Influenza Virus

June 4, 2011 | By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times / for the Booster Shots blog

If you're pregnant during flu season, you've got an extra reason to get a flu shot. Expectant mothers who received the influenza vaccine were less likely to have premature or smaller infants, according to a new study released Tuesday in PLoS Medicine. Preterm births -- when babies are born after less than 37 weeks of gestation -- are on the rise: From 9.5% in 1981 to 12.8% in 2006. And pregnant women are known to be at greater risk of the flu, which sweeps around the Northern and Southern hemispheres with seasonal regularity.

SACRAMENTO -- California officials would review the growing gambling industry in the state, looking at whether regulations promote job creation and examine the possibility of imposing new taxes on the activity, under a bill approved Monday by the state Senate. Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) introduced SB 601, which would have a gaming policy advisory committee made up equally of gambling industry officials and the general public look at issues including whether current regulations impede economic growth.

Three people were injured Sunday night during a possible gang-related shooting in Long Beach. Officers were patrolling the area of Cambodia Town about 7:20 p.m. when they heard gunshots near Lewis Avenue and Anaheim Street, according to Long Beach Police Department. When officers arrived they saw a shooting had occurred and three people needed to be hospitalized for non-life threatening injuries, police said. Anaheim Street was closed between Alamitos and Martin Luther King Jr. avenues as police investigated the incident.

A man who was shot by sheriff's deputies in Willowbrook on Sunday after he allegedly opened fire while holding his 1-year-old son is expected to survive, authorities said. The incident unfolded about 10 p.m. when the 43-year-old man, who was not immediately identified, drove to his ex-girlfriend's home in the 2400 block of East 126 th Street, confronted her boyfriend and allegedly shot him in the face with a revolver. After the shooting, the man allegedly drove away with his son, according to statement released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Russian medical authorities today reported the first three deaths in the country from the H1N1 influenza virus. The two women, ages 29 and 50, died in Chita, a provincial capital about 3,900 miles east of Moscow, Russia's chief sanitation official Gennady Onishchenko told Interfax news agency. Late in the afternoon, Deputy Health Care Minister Veronika Skvortsova told Echo Moskvy radio station that another woman died in Moscow. "The situation is under control and not significantly different from the usual seasonal flu situation," Viktor Maleyev, deputy chief of Russian Central Epidemiology Institute, said in a telephone interview.

Chinese health authorities have identified a brand-new type of bird flu that killed an elderly woman in November and infected at least one other person in January. That trend prompted the experts to call for stepped-up surveillance to track the new H10N8 influenza virus in poultry markets and in human patients. “The pandemic potential of this novel virus should not be underestimated,” the medical team wrote in a report published Wednesday by the journal Lancet. Genetic analysis of the H10N8 influenza virus revealed that it has two mutations that make flu viruses more virulent in mammals, according to the Lancet report.

The lethal avian flu that has infected tens of millions of chickens throughout Southeast Asia has been confirmed in Indonesia -- the seventh country ensnared in what the World Health Organization calls a "historically unprecedented spread" of the disease. In another disturbing report, WHO also said that the virus has mutated sufficiently to become impervious to two of the most commonly used and inexpensive antiviral drugs, amantadine and rimantadine.

"T HE threat of an influenza pandemic is, at present, one of the most significant public health issues our nation and world faces. " — Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenback, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, April 2007 "We know that a pandemic will eventually occur. We always say it's not a question of if; it's a question of when. " — Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 2007 A year ago, concerns about pandemic flu were running high, with the threat of an outbreak making newspaper headlines and television newscasts.

Zakrullah Nouri has never known a time when his country was not at war. But he doesn't waste time worrying about Taliban bombs or errant NATO airstrikes. Not when there's a new and stealthier killer: the H1N1 influenza virus. Afghanistan's first reported death from the disease, that of a 35-year-old engineer from the capital, Kabul -- was announced Oct. 28. Since then at least 10 more people have died in Kabul, said the minister of public health, Dr. Mohammad Amin Fatemi, on Monday.

A strain of unusually dangerous influenza that strikes all age groups and has caused a sharp increase in flu deaths in Los Angeles in the past has hit the county once again, health officials reported Friday. The influenza virus, detected in Los Angeles County last week and also reported in San Diego, was described by one health official as a variant of the deadly Hong Kong flu that struck millions throughout the world in 1968.